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Friday, January 5, 2018

Significant and seminal moments define our experiences in reference to the rest of our lives and our understandings thereof, but the only people who ever really "make history" are, well, historians.

This is not to say "I'm a historian and you are not, thus bow to the might of my cultivated knowledge and know your place." It's to say we should all become historians in some way, shape, or form in our own lives through an unremitting study of the past (even if it's only your personal past) amalgamated and perpetually processing into an interpretation useful to leveraging ourselves past the visible spectrum of what our accumulated experiences and conditioning have taught us is sane, sober, realistic, and safe and into a wider space of possibility where one can draw on lessons fed from the aggregate nexus of all recorded human experience in its grasped entirety (or, all remembered / recorded personal experience if history as a larger subject really isn't your thing).

It's the act of creating meaning through adding your particular (mis)understanding to the greater dance of emergent meaning across space and time. To actively deny oneself such self-analysis and constant evaluation is akin to dancing in the dark with no music. You don't have to dance with others around you, and you can still dance in the dark, but tune into the music to guide your movements at the very least.

In this sense, history is the music, and your interpretation thereof is the dance. Find all the creative ways to move within the tempo the song provides, because our only genuine guides in life are coherent interpretative models which balance our sensations of "I" with our sensations of "everything (and everyone) else." There is no end to this process of general and self-inquiry, because the point is to join the dance. However, as has already been analogically demonstrated, even if you are alone, you never really dance alone so long as you move and gyrate to the music of another.

Thus, the point is to dance, but to something other than the exclusive beat of your own drum.

(If anything, learn to beat your own drum in a band cus I've heard percussionists are hard to come by these days).

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

On the 11th
of November 1965, the former colonial protectorate of Britain known
as Rhodesia unilaterally declared independence from the United
Kingdom.1
Ian Smith, the Prime Minister of this new and contested sovereign
nation, was the first such leader of a former British possession to
unilaterally declare independence from the empire since the American
Declaration of Independence close to two centuries prior.2
Perhaps not so dissimilar as one may think, American and Rhodesian
separatism were in large part pushed to imperial defection by a
desire among certain circles of patrician elite to maintain, protect,
and/or augment their existing privileges. Both can also be seen as
party to perpetuating a cynically cavalier racial dominion over
Africans and their kidnapped American progeny in the interests of
white supremacy, though this is more often than not overlooked in the
popular history of the American Revolution (needless to say this is
not the case with the Civil War). There are very obvious historical
reasons for this as unlike Rhodesia in 1965, the American defectors
of the late 18th
century were not troubled by the rather overwhelming problem of
maintaining a form of minority rule over a massive and
racially-disenfranchised majority on the very continent they had
called home for millenia.3
Alongside this, colonialism as a concept and legitimate tool of
statecraft was no longer in vogue even in the mother country of
Britain itself; this, in fact, was one of the primary reasons Ian
Smith felt compelled to sign the Unilateral Declaration of
Independence in order to veer away from Britain's post-colonial
framework for establishing genuine majority rule in the country.4
Wishing to preserve white minority rule as the Republic of South
Africa was doing through the policy of apartheid, Smith and his rebel
cabal represented the last hopes to maintain this vision, one on par
with and undoubtedly deeply influenced by Cecil Rhodes, the man for
whom the region of Rhodesia was named. It gained this namesake during
the apex of British imperialism under Queen Victoria in 1895,5
and part and parcel to this imperial pride and fervour for wider
domination, Rhodes wrote the following very telling words in his
final will and testament of 1902: “The world is nearly all
parcelled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up,
conquered and colonised. To think of these stars that you see
overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I
would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes
me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”6
So who exactly was Cecil Rhodes and how much power and influence did
he truly wield during his time in southern Africa? As well, what
cursory effects did his legacy have throughout the period following
his death and into the present era, and what can his story tell us
about life in the Victorian age?

It would be impossible to claim
Rhodes' ambitions as the exclusive or overpowering force behind the
British colonial project on the southern half of the continent. As
with all historical leviathans, his legend obfuscates much of the
details of what he intended to accomplish as well as the key role his
multifarious influences played in shaping his worldview and
intentions. His myth is a great plume of smoke, and where there is
smoke, there is fire. Although the smoke of his popular myth is an
important subject which will be broached later in this writing, the
discipline of historical analyses demands we investigate the fire and
trace an accurately compelling sketch of all that from which Cecil
Rhodes emerged to become such a controversial force to be reckoned
with. One of his favourite books which he carried with him
practically everywhere he went was the “Meditations”
of the ancient Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Throughout his copy of
the book, Rhodes avidly emphasized the passages most affecting to him
through ubiquitous circling and underlining in such a way as to
communicate the earnest intensity of his revelations. He called
“Meditations”
his “guide in life” and his “most precious possession.”7
Through an analysis of the 101 passages Rhodes particularly
emphasized (and provided by Rotberg8)
the gist of the relevant themes can be broadly grouped into four
categories:

1: Death can come at any moment, thus one should live as if it were
imminent;

2: Intellect and reason take precedence over emotions;

3: “Just acts are their own reward”; in other words, do what is
seriously meaningful, and avoid engagement in all that is deemed
frivolous;

4: Success in one's life and
ventures is largely contingent on working well with others, staying
open to compromise, cultivating and maintaining the ability to
listen, and not being so prideful so as to become closed to changing
one's mind.9

From this analytical
distillation, we can see that Rhodes was driven largely by a
humanistic set of values emanating from the Renaissance and its trend
towards the venerated study of ancient authors. By and large, it is
likely that Rhodes already had a sense of all he learned from
Aurelius, but found a certain confirmation of his ambitious
intentions better articulated in the words of another. However,
“Meditations”
was not the only work of literature Rhodes found himself enamoured
with at the time. Written by William Winwood Reade and published in
1872, “The Martyrdom
of Man” was a highly
controversial secular work of 'universal' history which broadly
supported political liberalism alongside a particular vision of
social Darwinism.10
The section most contested by critics was one which attacked
Christian dogmas at length, and it lead many to misinterpret Reade as
an atheist when he had, in fact, believed in some sort of Creator,
just not in the set image decided upon by the established religions
of his day.11
In this sense, he viewed the Christianity of his time as committing
conceptual idolatry, thus facilitating a general ignorance resulting
in dangerous worldly consequences as all operated on the basis of a
collective illusion within which ultimate 'truth' was thought to
reside. Rhodes, though a more traditional Christian than Winwood
Reade, was deeply influenced by Reade's book. It seemed to confirm
much of his intuitions regarding organized religion, acknowledging
that God does indeed exist, but that he is not interested in humans
as individuals, nor did he create man in his image.12
By 1889, as he reached the apex of his power, Rhodes, according to
his good friend and key guarantor of his will William Stead, “neatly
reconciles the two opposing tectonic movements of the Victorian age,
science and religion, by concluding that God was supervising the
perfection of the species by a process of natural selection ... and
[that] the struggle for existence [was] recognised as the favourite
instruments of the Divine Ruler.'”13
From this base of humanistic imperial thought stems the paternalistic
racism which Rhodes came to embody for many during his lifetime and
long past his death.

It
was the overtures of yet another author contemporary to his time that
many historians mark as the key and timely inspiration to Cecil's
ambitions to expand the British Empire. In a lecture at Oxford
University which is now part of school's lore, famous literary critic
John Ruskin implored his audience that “[t]here is a destiny now
possible to us … We are still undegenerate in race; a race mingled
of the best northern blood … We are not yet dissolute in temper …
Will you youth of England make your country again a royal throne of
kings? … This is what England must do or perish, she must found
colonies as far and as fast as she is able.”14
Many previous tellings of Rhodes' life portray him as present at the
lecture itself, though this has been proven to be untrue through
later investigation. Instead, it seems he purchased or otherwise
obtained a transcript published by the Clarendon Press not long
following Ruskin's 1870 address.15
The influence this lecture exerted on Rhodes, however, is
uncontested. This is evidenced in his own words when he writes that
Ruskin's “lectures made a great impression on one [and] [o]ne of
them which set out the privileges and opportunities of the young men
in the Empire made a forceful entry into my mind.”16
It once again reinforced his grand ambitions and explicitly imbued
them with a sense of innate racial superiority alongside an ethereal
urgency to 'correct' the course of humanity as a whole under British
tutelage. This struggle for global hegemonic survival, a macrocosm of
the preferred 'instruments' of the Divine Ruler as Cecil believed,
seemed to precipitate a zero-sum view of politics and the proverbial
“Other” through the normalized magnifier of late Victorian
melodrama.

This
melodrama was, for all intents and purposes, the closest thing to the
language of scientific objectivity accepted in public discourse at
the time. The 'discipline' of history as we once understood it was a
melodramatic focus on an event in light of Victorian morality and/or
one actor's inflated heroics or villainy, qualifying it more as a way
for British imperialism at the time to spawn and cultivate a
mythology capable of perpetuating a dominantly coherent image and
'sensation' of the empire's powerful grandeur.17
Neil Hultgren, in his book “Melodramatic
Imperial Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes,”
writes that ‘‘[t]hrough its vividness and ability to reimagine
complexities via readily accessible binaries and concepts, melodrama
made the British Empire appear unified and comprehensible. It
was one of the central fictions through which another fiction—that
of the British Empire—might be understood.’’18
This last sentence of Hultgren's quote (with italic emphasis added by
the author of this paper) points to the importance of melodrama as
one of the key socially constructive pillars which permitted the
Union Jack to continue billowing listlessly in the wind across the
disparate width and breadth of the globe. To perpetuate itself across
a series of held territories and dominions whose aggregate
non-British population was beyond any doubt the very vast majority,
the empire had to make itself seem larger and more powerful than it
actually was, a purpose which this melodrama more than sufficiently
served during its time. Cecil Rhodes was no exception to this trend
as he earnestly bought into this spirit of the day through his wild
ambitions and penchant to glorify his own achievements, even if at
times this was only in the framework of the 'selfless martyrdom' of
his efforts on behalf of the British imperial project. In short,
Rhodes had a tendency—instrumental in his role as the 'Colossus of
Africa' and not unusual for his time—to self-mythologize. As his
notoriety spread for better and for worse, this process of
self-mythologizing would likely have become a recurring feedback loop
as the melodramatic Victorian press breathlessly disseminated reports
of his glorious achievements, reinforcing Rhodes own self-sense as
someone who was now larger than life, perhaps even a 'prophet' of a
secular religion of sorts coalescing around the colloquial church of
British imperial dogmas. Perhaps one of the best ways to demonstrate
Cecil's imperial melodrama is to point the reader back to his quote
provided on page two at the end of the introductory paragraph, the
last half in which he declares that “[t]o think of these stars that
you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never
reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that.
It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”19
This statement was something that even many in the 19th
century would have found pejoratively melodramatic, though as the
legend of Cecil Rhodes continued to wildly inflate, the perceived
preposterousness of this and his other similar statements
by-and-large diminished as he was informally 'canonized' as a
gloriously heroic example of British imperial virtue in the same
league as characters like King Arthur and the Knights of the Round
Table. However, Rhodes is unique in the longevity his mythologized
idolatry has enjoyed, even up to and including the present day.
Though its origins undoubtedly reside in the British imperialism of
the late Victorian era, this longevity can largely be attributed to
the fact that Rhodes was also the founder of the modern diamond
industry.

Rhodes,
after outmaneuvering market rivals in the area of Kimberley (situated
in what is now the north-central region of the Republic of South
Africa) in the midst of a diamond rush in the 1870s-80s, established
DeBeers Consolidated Mines in 1888.20
In the decades immediately following Rhodes' death, DeBeers would go
on to socially construct the modern cultural preference for diamond
rings as the new orthodox necessity to be presented when proposing
marriage.21
Remarkably, it was a way of controlling not only the supply side of
the industry, but also its demand through manufacturing the
perception that the combination of diamonds and marriage was a
cultural necessity, and as such one could no longer adequately claim
to have the latter without sacrificing to gift the former.22
Even the pithy maxim asserting “A Diamond Is Forever” originated
from an assertive DeBeers public relations campaign in the late
1940s,23
though an investigation and assessment of Rhodes' company in the
decades and century following his passing is a topic in itself best
left to detailed treatment elsewhere as it is beyond the scope of
this essay. Regardless, such a cursory look at this aspect of his
immense legacy does indeed demonstrate his historical relevance as it
pertains to understanding the global market and cultural context of
the present day. As well, through all that has been said of Cecil
Rhodes thus far there has been, save for the introductory paragraph,
the conspicuous absence of any meaningful investigation and analysis
of his Anglophilic white supremacy. This topic will be addressed in
the following and final paragraph which will also double as the
paper's conclusion, bringing us back full circle to the 1960s, the
decade which saw the beginning of the end for the country bearing his
namesake.

In
the same final will and testament of 1902 in which he declared his
melodramatic desire to 'annex the planets,' Rhodes also wrote that “I
contend that we [the English] are the first race in the world, and
that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human
race.”24
Buying wholesale into the racialization of empire—in part a result
of the force his personal interpretation of Winwood Reade's social
Darwinism had on him via “The
Martyrdom of Man”—Rhodes
began to speak of the native African population as a rightly
disenfranchised subject peoples. In an 1887 address to the House of
Assembly in Cape Town, Rhodes explicitly stated that “[t]he native
is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise. We must adopt a
system of despotism in our relations with the barbarians of South
Africa.”25
Under his auspices, the taking of land from native Africans using
armed force became acceptably routine.26
The prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, established through funds
authorized by his estate following his death, does curiously
stipulate that no one can be denied a scholarship on the basis of
race, ethnicity, or religion.27
Educational historian Marybeth Gasman asserts this was likely not in
reference to the native black population, but rather the white Boers,
with whom British settlers and their progeny had shared a long and
mutually adversarial distrust. Eventually, however, even the Rhodes
Scholarship went the way of Rhodesia and had to capitulate to the
demography of the native majority. However, though it went the way of
Rhodesia, it did not go
away as
Rhodesia did in 1980 when Robert Mugabe won power and re-branded the
country as Zimbabwe. Instead, as time went on and policies of
apartheid were repealed or overthrown across the southern half of the
continent, the Rhodes Scholarship simply cancelled the criteria which
had previously barred both women and black Africans from
eligibility.28
Its imperial origins are still controversial among many, though just
as Cecil Rhodes himself was a product of his time (eg.: a product of
Victorian melodrama as his cultural modus
operandi),
so too was the Rhodes Scholarship. As history has sped forward, its
context has evolved to become displaced and more just than it was at
inception, just as we have all evolved to understand that what Cecil
saw in the “Other” as embodied in the native Africans was,
perhaps, less an accurate appraisal of another than it was a
reflection of himself: an intensely driven megalomaniac who could—and
does, in many contemporary African eyes—likewise qualify as a
barbarian in his own terrible right, a self-confessed despot who
could not be trusted to rule equitably.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS ESSAY WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN FOR A POST-SECONDARY LEVEL CLASS ON VICTORIAN BRITAIN.

Thursday, November 16, 2017

The
prolific 17th
century European polyglot, philosopher, and mathematician Gottfried
Leibniz once said that "ambition is not less effective than
love" in achieving political ends beneficial to all (Roldan
2011). In particular, what he meant by this was that were a sovereign
to decide to invest himself in the project of uniting the European
continent, it would matter not whether this sovereign did it with the
altruistic objective of establishing “perpetual peace,” or if he
pushed such advocacy on the self-interested premise of causing the
collapse of the House of Hapsburg for his own relative gain. So long
as the effort worked to the ultimate political and material benefit
of the vast majority, it was something to be supported in good
conscience regardless of the hegemonic agency's ulterior motives.
Leibniz's point was greater than that, though; he was attempting to
illustrate through example a position of political realism in his
critique of a popular treatise advocating 'perpetual peace' in
Europe. Written in 1713 by Charles-Irénée Castel, better known
simply by his religious title of the abbé de Saint-Pierre, the
treatise advocated for the formation of a confederal union not only
of Europe, but ultimately the entire world in idealistic eventuality
(Roldan 2011). Leibniz, though he deeply admired Castel's work in its
attempt and good intentions, asserted that the monk had not solved
the perennial issue of how to make monarchs “want perpetual peace,”
even if he believed that were such a hypothetical objective achieved,
said perpetual peace was conceivably possible. The problem was not
logistics or a lack of aggregate human ability to stop war, but the
vicissitudes of human nature itself; and though we now live in an era
where a form of European political unity has been achieved (whether
meaningfully or nominally is a matter of strong debate), these very
same critical observations ring just as true in form as they did at
their time of conception three centuries ago. This essay will briefly
summarize, investigate, and analyze the history of the concept of
European unity and will present the ways in which such an
investigation can give us a deeper understanding of the issues facing
the contemporary European Union by posing
and answering—to the greatest extent possible—what could be
described as either one question in two parts, or two questions in
one. First: what was the proposed anatomy of—and the ultimate cause
of failure for—attempts at European unity proposed prior to the
20th
century? And two: based on the demonstrable presupposition that such
unifying projects were conceived of and organized in opposition to a
larger perceived external threat and lacking such a similar cohesive
opposition narrative as the Soviet Cold War threat with which the
modern European project legitimized much of its
supranational-integrationist character, what kind of future can be
reasonably expected for the EU based on the patterns observed in a
broader evaluation of the history of such a union in both concept and
attempt? As well, all of this will be contextualized within the
complexity of our present era, a direct result of the fracturing of
these internal and external unifying grand narrative structures and
contrasts across the world as a result of globalization and
asymmetrical warfare with hostile non-state actors such as ISIS and
al Qaeda.

'European Unity' Then and Now:

As of November 2017, the time of this writing, it seems
clear to both political observers and scholars of political science
that the primary source of dissonance in the Union exists in a clash
between localized identities and cosmopolitan neoliberal capitalism
(Pan 2016). The Brexit referendum of June 2016 is a clear
demonstration of this as one of the greatest points of domestic
controversy in the United Kingdom at the time was the prolific hiring
of workers from Central and Eastern Europe for menial employment at
low wages throughout the country. This was a result of an essential
component of the EU Single Market facilitating the free movement of labor and capital throughout the Eurozone. The fact that such a
concern for lost jobs focused on the continued presence of other
Europeans simultaneous to the destabilizing influx of refugees and
migrants from the war-zones of Libya, Iraq, and Syria speaks volumes
on the resurfacing showdown between compartmentalized nationalism(s) and European integrationism throughout the
continent. In one respect, it seems logical that long and strongly
established nationalist sentiments would maintain a problematic
magnetism as compared to the attempts to cultivate a larger, though
ethereal, form of European collective identity. On another level,
however, there indeed has been a potent sense of shifting common
European identity for just over half a millennia which, up to and
including the inauguration of the European Union itself with the
signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1952, has found greater stimulus and
dissemination with the publication of formal and informal proposals
for a European political union, sometimes in the form of a massive
continental superstate, and other times through the looser
intergovernmental framework of institutions established to facilitate
perpetual multilateral dialogue and coordination. Such proposed
multilateralism was an anomalous novelty until it saw practice
through meaningful implementation in the 20th
century amidst the aftermath of the immense industrial slaughters and
destruction of World War's One and Two. However, collective
identities are not forged with any meaningful longevity merely from
proposition or disseminated discourse and debate alone, but from the
composition, mythologies and institutional arrangements of concrete
political entities such as states, confederations, and empires. In
this respect, the echo of European unity was established in
territorial precedent during the zenith years of the Roman Empire,
though at this time there was no such concept—and thus no such
thing—as “Europe” as we would understand it today. The story of
the contemporary concept of Europe as we know it begins with the
Christian religiously-centred geographical abstraction of
Christianitas, which
gained popular use for the first time in Late Antiquity with the
ever-growing number of devotees to the new faith who scattered
themselves across the Roman Empire—first, to flee persecution from
Roman authorities, and not long after to evangelize so-called
'pagans' (Pasture 2015). This concept of Christianitas
soon became supplanted by the near-equivalent and more ubiquitously
recognizable term Christendom as
the years of Late Antiquity faded into what would come to be known as
the early medieval period (Pasture 2015). It is here that our survey
investigation and analysis begins.

A Brief
History of 'Europe' in Concept and Etymology:

Although the ancient Greeks coined the
term “Europa” long prior even to the establishment of early Rome,
it was not an abstraction of geography, but rather the name of one of
their Phoenician deities. A princess god who, aside from a shared
terminological etymology with “Europe,” had no relation to or
influence on the future concept or its associated cultural and
political practices (Pasture 2015). During their time, the Greeks
actually feared and despised the greater European landmass and its
inhabitants, preferring instead to cultivate a set of tentative
connections in and knowledge of the civilizations to the east of
their island-dotted peninsula. Historical records indicate that the
term “Europe” was first used in reference to the continent (or
segments of it) by Pope Gregory I in the 6th
century not, as one may assume, in self-reference, but rather in
reference to invading tribes from the northern Germanic territories.
The term is then first used in external reference by those who we
would traditionally consider culturally 'non-European' in the middle
of the 8th century
as evidenced from the work of an otherwise unknown Mozarab chronicler
living in Umayyad Spain (Pasture 2015). In his writings, he
identified Christian forces under the command of the Frankish King
Charles Martel as “European,” thus implying that the Umayyad's
were not. This demonstrates both the cultural centrality and the
geographic ambiguity of Europe in concept throughout this and
subsequent centuries, up to and including the present European Union.
It is also a potent example of how external threats played a central
role in the process of forming a European identity via contrast,
regardless of whether such terminology was utilized by those external
or internal to its amorphous and constantly shifting purview of
definition. However, to provide a full synopsis of Europe as a basic
cultural and geographical concept is beyond the scope of this paper.
Having examined the relative linguistic and etymological origins of
such, we will now turn to investigate the origins and first recorded
instances of proposals for a political union of Europe (eg:
Christendom), starting
with the Hussite George of Poděbrady who was King of Bohemia in the
15th century from
the year of his coronation in 1458 until his death in 1471.

The Project for Perpetual Peace:

George of Poděbrady, as sovereign of
Bohemia, penned a formal diplomatic document known in English as the
“Treaty on the Establishment of Peace
throughout Christendom” sometime during or
just prior to the year 1464 (Šimůnek 2010). Predicated on the
aforementioned religious-territorial idea of Christendom,
which at the time would have consisted geographically of roughly most
of Europe west of the modern Russian Federation (with some notable
exceptions), the Treaty sought to establish a permanent political
union of equal but independent Christian/European states, both terms
being at this time fluidly interchangeable (Šimůnek 2010, Pasture
2015). It differed quite radically from the conventional instruments
of medieval diplomacy in that its proposal took the obtuse form of a
multilateral agreement at a time when bilateral arrangements between
realms were largely—if not entirely—the exclusive norm and
practice. It is in respect to this attempted multilateralism that
historians as well as political scholars of modern Europe assert King
George's Treaty proposal to be the first clear precedent to the
contemporary European Union in 'deep' history.1
George was also a part of the pre-Protestant Christian reformers
known as the Hussite's and was thus considered a heretic by the Holy
See in Rome. His strategic calculus in penning his proposal for a
Christian union was in part influenced by his desire to offset the
overwhelming coercive power of the Catholic Church (Šimůnek 2010)
and can thus additionally be seen as an antecedent component to the
Protestant Reformation of the 16th
century. Although serious formal discussions to realize this vision
of political unity did indeed take place between 1462 and 1464, these
efforts stalled and ultimately fell apart entirely as vitriolic
accusations of heresy were flung back and forth and wars of words
often escalated into physical military confrontations between states
and sectarian actors (Šimůnek 2010). King George of Poděbrady died
in 1471 having failed in his efforts to bring together the realms of
Christendom in a political union on the justification of uniting against the
Turkish threat to the east (Šimůnek 2010). Although a single
sovereign had at least nominally taken up the cause of a relative
form of 'perpetual peace,' the seminal impediment observed by Leibniz
as to how to make monarchs “want perpetual peace” on a scale
significant enough to truly manifest meaningful or even somewhat
tangible results had not been overcome. Regardless, an important
historical precedent had now been set which would be largely
overlooked for centuries as new proposals for European unity began to
appear independently of the example set by King George. One such
proposal was the treatise mentioned in the introduction to this paper
written by Charles-Irénée Castel, the abbé de Saint-Pierre, in
1713. Titled the “Projet pour rendre la paix
perpétuelle en Europe” (which literally
translates as the “Project to make peace perpetual in Europe”),
Castel's treatise was inspired by and based on an even earlier
proposal made by William Penn, the notorious English Quaker and
colonial founder of the modern day American state of Pennsylvania, in
1693. Penn wrote that to secure peace and justice, the powers of
Europe had to organize an international meeting place at which a
European Parliament, assembly of Estates, or Imperial Diet could
congregate on a constantly ongoing multilateral basis to coordinate
certain matters of policy as well as arbitrate disputes between
members of equal standing (Pasture 2015). In his proposal for a
European Parliament, Penn even went so far as to elaborate on the the
amount of seats any particular member state should reasonably hold,
basing his numbers on population and existing geopolitical power
differentials. The exact details utilized to illustrate his argument
were only hypothetical in his writing seeing as there is no
historical evidence to suggest he was privy to official information
on European demography. In substance, his proposed European
Parliament was not only much before its time, it was also so
uncannily similar to the mandate and structure of the modern European
Parliament of the 21st
century as to seem almost accidentally prophetic. His proposal was
also unprecedented in its injunction to enrol the non-Christian
powers of the Muscovites and Turks into this supranational union as
fully equal partners, thus uniquely marking the phenomenon of war
itself as the primary external threat against which all
should congregate in solidarity to defeat or, at the very least,
restrain (Pasture 2015). In a continent still physically at war with
itself over matters of religious conscience, however, Penn's was an
extremely outlandish proposal. Though it was studied sincerely by
scholars of subsequent decades and extracted of its most seminal
insights, the broadness of his vision was not something that would
convince a critical mass of already bickering and prejudicial
sovereigns to take up the project of perpetual peace as it was based
not on any sense of political realism, but instead on an extreme
idealism. In other words, it was based on love and did not appeal to
any executive ambition with which it could have perhaps garnered some
relative leverage in the political discourse taking place within the
corridors of power. Castel's work essentially repeated this naive
faux pas as he, like Penn, was working not from a place of political
sobriety, but religiously-inspired idealism. In both cases, the
intentions were laudable, but Leibniz's central point still stood. In
the century and a half following the publication of Castel's work,
two of history's great philosophical powerhouses, Immanuel Kant and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, would also articulately insert themselves into
the debate and subsequent discourse on this “Project for Perpetual
Peace.” Having elaborated in detail on the primary precedents under
inspection in this writing, however, we will unfortunately be largely
overlooking the contributions of these two men as limitations on
length restrict them both to beyond the scope of this paper. Having
established the key precedents to the modern project of European
unity, we will now briefly touch upon the events of the mid-20th
century directly leading into the 1952 signing of the Treaty of Rome
before concluding with a predictive analysis as to what all of the
above can tell us about the geopolitical future of the continent as
we edge closer to the dawn of the 2020's.

Churchill,
the United States of Europe,

and a
Closing Word on Europe's Today and Tomorrow:

Winston Churchill, known best for his tenure as British
Prime Minister during the chaotic period of the Second World War, had in
years prior already been exposed to the cause of politically uniting
Europe through the public relations campaigns and explicit overtures
of such prominent organizations as the International Paneuropean
Union created and lead by the famous Austrian-Japanese philosopher
and politician Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi (Packwood 2016).
In fact, Churchill had been pondering European unity in some form or
another since as early as 1904, as evidenced in papers on the topic
which were in his possession at the time. His advocacy for a
proverbial 'United States of Europe' began officially, however, on
February 15th,
1930 with the publication of an eponymously titled article in the
Saturday Evening Post where
he described the overwhelming need to preserve what he identified as
'the best of European civilization' by abolishing “the tangled
growth and network of tariff barriers designed to restrict trade and
production to particular areas,” thus consequently returning to
“the old foundations of Europe” in which unity was contiguously
imposed and maintained by such venerated authorities as the Roman
Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the “catholicity” of European
Christendom, and
Napoleon Bonaparte (Packwood 2016). Finally, it seemed like there was
a chance of convincing a critical mass of sovereigns (or, rather, the
political equivalents of their time) to endorse a concrete form of
continental political unity. The destruction of (particularly
western) Europe as a result of World War Two prompted a radical
intervention from the United States in the form of the Marshall Plan
(Pasture 2015). Its mandate was to bankroll as well as provide
physical assistance in the reconstruction of the continent, but it
came with a catch. In return for this unprecedented international
assistance, Europe had to
agreeto re-organize
itself along the lines of a bonafide United States of Europe. Though
part of this was motivated by an altruistic will to assist devastated
allies and alleviate the suffering of fellow human beings, another
motivation—just as important—was to guarantee against the threat
of further Soviet communist expansion, whether in the form of
directly annexed territory or the exertion of indirect geopolitical
influence. Churchill's official position on the matter notably
changed following the agreement to and implementation of the Marshall Plan. Once a great supporter of the United
Kingdom being “with Europe” but “not of it,” he suddenly came
out in relative support of Britain's incorporation into this united
European polity (Packwood 2016). Thus, through the force of
collective economic compromise in the wake of the most devastating
war in human history, the new unipolar American global superpower
bargained a critical mass of these colloquial European sovereigns
into finally endorsing political union. Leibniz's objection to the
abbé de Saint-Pierre had finally been overcome by the force of
history and the quirks of an ascendant world order, the likes of
which the world had never known before. However, history is the story
of precedents which are set and later used to guide future efforts,
but too often we are dragged into new situations and world order's
that have no precedent or existing playbook and which we must
awkwardly stumble through blindly in order to truly receive their
lessons for posterity. The 21st
century is one such era, and at this point, we can only hope we as a
race will make it through this catastrophic bottleneck to pass on
what we have learned to future generations through the precedents we
have—and have yet—to set. The grand unifying narratives of old
have, for the most part, faded entirely or fragmented into the
compartmentalized echo-chambers of partisan identity politics. For
once, there is no clear enemy or conventional threat with defined
borders and a standing army with which to identify collectively in
opposition against. The new 'enemies' are jihadist sleeper-cells and
lone wolves who legally pass as civilians until their deed is clearly
already in process and it is too late to prevent their assault, as
well as the shadowy 'political elite' in Brussels and the many cabals
of elected representatives throughout the member states of the
European Union who seem to be 'collaborating' with them; a worldview
demonstrably acted upon in the slim victory of the 'Leave' campaign
in the UK's Brexit referendum. The state is no longer a standard
basis of identity, but an obtuse vessel in a world order defined
primarily by relational asymmetry between individuals, groups,
organizations, and, yes, even nations themselves on a
nearly-unrestricted scale spanning the length and width of the entire
globe. Previous attempts at and proposals for European unity
throughout history failed because everyone knew far too well who they were and who they were not;
hence a Catholic knew without a doubt that living in peace with a
Lutheran was unthinkable as it was a matter of religious conscience
and risked one losing access to eternal life in the Heavenly Kingdom.
The current enterprise at European unity, if it does not collapse
entirely under the weight of old ghosts and bad habits that refuse to
die, will remain in at least relative precariousness—embroiled in
political spats and potentially even outright geopolitical
upheaval—until the end of humanity, and thus the end of large
groups with which a spectrum of conflicting viewpoints much be
reconciled with and compromised between. Old habits truly do die
hard, as evidenced in our desire for that Biblical Shining City on a
Hill, or for our desire to see an end to conflict in and of itself
when conflict is an inevitable fact of life insofar as we have ever
known or observed it. In conclusion, although length restricted him
from incorporation through meaningful analysis in this paper, it
seems that the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau from his “A
Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe”
are just as true now as they were in 1782:

“The present balance of Europe is just
firm enough to remain in perpetual oscillation without losing itself
altogether; and, if our troubles cannot increase, still less can we
put an end to them, seeing that any sweeping revolution is henceforth
an impossibility” (Rousseau 1782).

1'Deep history' here meaning that it is beyond the usual purview of European Union history as investigated and reviewed within the limited confines of the 20th/21st centuries and their many seminal moments. Essentially, it is the investigation of precedents to European unity prior to 1900 CE, whereas anything after this threshold would be considered 'recent' history for the sake of this paper.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS AN ESSAY WRITTEN FOR A CLASS ON EUROPEAN UNION & INTEGRATION AT A POST-SECONDARY LEVEL.

Thursday, September 21, 2017

Often lately I've been contemplating
“responsibility,” both as a concept and a word. To say we have a
responsibility means, as is quite literally enumerated in the word
itself, your ability to respond; eg. your “response-ability.”
It's not so much an abstract construct as it is a general disposition
contingent on your capacity to notice events, people, and objects
around you and thus 'compute' your responses to such based on your
available repertoire of abilities. At its most basic form, it's
nothing more than how you respond to life and all events, people, and
objects in it. In its higher form, it's also what initiatives one's
intention to respond may generate and thus entail.

Ultimately, both basic and higher form
response-ability are unavoidable. To attempt to abdicate either is
simply to stand in petrified denial of life itself. The beautiful
thing, however, is that there is no concrete road-map or template
with which to assuage existential angst or command yourself with
unwavering certainty as to what a 'correct' response would be or
might look like. Some of the more philosophically traumatized writers
of the past century have presented this as a terrifying state of
affairs in the absence of the illusory certainty previously provided
by Judaeo-Christianity, often topping off a similar diatribe about
the ambiguity inherent in one's choosing how to respond in any given
circumstance with, “and now man is utterly alone in the universe,
condemned to act and react to life in its totality on the fragmentary
and thus flawed moral and ethical merits devised and implemented by
himself, and himself alone.”

This is one of many 19th and
20th century philosophical examples (paraphrased and
reduced from the writings of many nihilists, existentialists,
post-structuralists, etc.) of the psychic overcompensation for the
loss of God in the general cultural metanarrative(s) of our day. This
was expected even by Nietzsche, the man who himself declared God dead when he
wrote: “After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for
centuries in a cave - a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but
given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years
in which his shadow will be shown. And we still have to vanquish his
shadow, too.” In the absence of God, our metanarratives became, at
best, emptier, more confusing, seemingly illegible—while at worst,
they morphed into vacuous black-holes that sucked away all that was
previously thought so sacred and meaningful in our lives.

Either way, the important point is that
a collective psychological wound was inflicted upon us, and as all
organisms do when wounded, we recoiled in pain. But since it was a
collective reflex recorded in detail for posterity through the work
of many brilliant thinkers, many of us became as immersed in and as
convinced of these new insights like they were eternal religious
truths, something to fill the gaping hole of meaning left by God,
even if this 'meaning' described its central meaningful insight as
'meaninglessness.' Some philosophers and their readers thus found the
certainty they had lost in their new doctrinal uncertainty. In other
words, they were no longer simply uncertain; they were certainly uncertain. Even if this led to bleakness in perspective, some of
those who felt they needed the guarantee of certainty were willing to
go to the darkest corners of the psyche to find it.

In this certain uncertainty, many of us
fell for the illusion of a fiercely hyperbolic individuality and
lost our ability to respond meaningfully to life, because life,
though certain in its uncertainty, remained as dead as before. This
describes the state and sensation of abdicating responsibility
(response-ability) on both key levels, and demonstrates the petrified
denial of life itself that results from and embodies this attitude.

It is my assertion that we now have the
will and ability to cross this horizon of hopelessness in human
thinking. By taking responsibility for ourselves, holding a belief in
our honest heroics, truly cultivating our ability to respond to
anything life does or can throw at us without compromise, and
trusting our impulses to meaning without becoming intoxicated by
neatly ordered systematized worldviews that appear to offer us some
form of certainty equivalent to the old self-evident religious truths
we've lost, and if we can do all of this without rejecting meaning
wholesale whenever we lack the old conventional resorts provided by
ready-made worldviews, we'll once again wake ourselves up and ask the
most important question of all: “is it not beautiful?”

On This Day in History:

Our World Is Ours to Keep.

Copyright

The world is meaningless,

there is no God or gods, there are no morals, the universe is not moving inexorably towards any higher purpose.All meaning is man-made, so make your own, and make it well.Do not treat life as a way to pass the time until you die.Do not try to "find yourself", you must make yourself.Choose what you want to find meaningful and live, create, love, hate, cry, destroy, fight and die for it.Do not let your life and your values and your actions slip easily into any mold, other that that which you create for yourself, and say with conviction, "This is who I make myself".Do not give in to hope.Remember that nothing you do has any significance beyond that with which you imbue it.Whatever you do, do it for its own sake.When the universe looks on with indifference, laugh, and shout back, "Fuck You!".Rembember that to fight meaninglessness is futile, but fight anyway, in spite of and because of its futility.The world may be empty of meaning, but it is a blank canvas on which to paint meanings of your own.Live deliberately. You are free.

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About Me

I am a twenty-four year old male living in the western Canadian city of Victoria, British Columbia. I politically self-identify as a libertarian socialist, and religiously seem to embody philosophical Taoism in terms of my spiritual worldview.